Ask HN: DarkSky Alternatives? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: DarkSky Alternatives?

59 pointsw-ll56 comments

What for desktop and/or mobile are yall using to replace Dark Sky?

https://merrysky.net/ is the closest I've found yet to the Dark Sky mobile web ux

Wow. Thanks for posting this

This is impressively very close! It uses Pirate Weather, a thread on accuracy from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34198683

Seems to be way off the mark, at least here in Europe.

I always wondered why DarkSky was so popular. Was it the design? It was known to be generally inaccurate among meteorologists, while other apps (METAR+TAF especially) would be remarkably accurate.

I don't intend this to be a jab at anyone's app preferences, but I'm very interested in the value proposition that hooked people.

In rainy parts of the US such as the Pacific North West coast, having a thirty minute warning that it's about to rain is really handy. It can make the difference between biking home sopping wet or squeezing in between two downbursts of rain. The rest of the app was fine, but not great. It demanded constant attention as its "predictions" changed constantly.

This! It was that combination of rain radar and really obvious app specific audio alarms that no other weather app seems to understand.

I live in Scotland, a famously rainy country. We line dry our laundry outside and dark sky alerted me take it indoors before rain for years.

Then Apple took it away and my laundry regularly gets rained on.

The closest I've found for this functionality on Android is Rain Alarm. It has two flaws though. One is that it uses public rain radar data that only updates every 15 mins, so often you get an alert when its already started raining. The second is that it uses a circular search path, so you get false positive rain alerts that it's raining 3km away when that rain shower is actually passing by and will not hit us.

For these features Dark Sky was unique and accurate enough.

I've had decent luck with the Met Office app for Android

The weather is only at 1hr intervals but the rain radar maps are at 15min and you get the last 6 hours and the next 24, so you can see where patches of rain are coming from and where they're going to be at which time

Most users aren't meteorologists. I found the precip radar view good and it was smooth for projecting out a couple hours which was important for deciding if I wanted to golf or not because it wad easy to see if a storm was likely to clip my club. That's something none of the current apps I've tried since replicate nearly as well.

They were effectively first easy-to-use near-/short-term forecasting service.

It was also a true "indie" project with 2 (3?) guys with no relevant background deciding to tackle an annoyance in their own lives. They did it and it happened to work well. They did a kickstarter. Then they tried being aggressive with the growth and it didn't go so well.

Also their dataviz was really pretty. That helped.

At least for me here in the UK the live-updated rain was very accurate, you could watch it come and go in pretty much real time combined with looking out the window.

I'm struggling to find anything like it now, it was incredibly useful since I go out a lot to do little jobs and if its a crappy weather day (pretty much every day this time of year) it was nice to check to see if I had enough time to do something or if I'd need to go out and cover some things up.

I've never used the app, only the website.

I find rain alarm good enough for this.

I always found that for very near term forecasts it was better than alternatives. But the further out my time horizon the less good it was.

“What’s this weeks weather going to be” I’d use another source.

“Will I get rained in if I leave the house now, or should I wait 30 mins?” I’d use dark sky

I’ve switched to Apple Weather which has been a reasonable replacement but I don’t like it as much

Apple claimed to have integrated Dark Sky's technologies into their Weather app but clearly haven't. I've relied on Dark Sky's rain notifications for years and they've always been remarkably accurate (UK here), but the stock Weather app sends maybe one notification per 100 rains. So far this year, since Apple turned off Dark Sky, I haven't received a single rain notification and consequently I've been absolutely drenched on several dog walks.

I ran both in parallel for a while. Local to me they were pretty close but not quite the same. Dark Sky was always more accurate when they differed.

https://www.weather.gov/

NOAA is where most of the other US-based weather services are getting their data from anyway. Why go to a secondary source when the primary source is free?

that’s just for one country…

DarkSky was one of the few exceptions here. My understanding is they performed their own modeling and forecasting.

That looks terrible on a mobile device.

Geometric Weather (for Android) is free, open source, and nicely designed. Data sources include AccuWeather (default), OpenWeatherMap, Météo-France, and Caiyun (China).

- F-Droid: https://f-droid.org/packages/wangdaye.com.geometricweather/

- Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=wangdaye.com.g...

- Source: https://github.com/WangDaYeeeeee/GeometricWeather

A beta version of Geometric Weather is available for testing on iOS: https://github.com/WangDaYeeeeee/GeometricWeather-iOS

Are you asking about API or just about weather data source for forecast?

I was comparing many data sources over many weeks and my results in Prague were Aeris weather most accurate (least false positives/negatives for rain), then gap and Foreca and MET Norway same and then big gap and you have very bad sources like Dark Sky, AccuWeather, Weatherbit and Open weather which are unusable.

As for the mobile apps on Android I use Weawow (has all 3 most accurate sources) and Today Weather (no Aeris, but had Foreca and MET Norway).

I'd recommend these two apps and comparing sources for few weeks to find out which one is the most accurate for your location, because accuracy varies across different locations, so there won't be single correct universal answer what you should use.

Carrot Weather: https://www.meetcarrot.com/weather/

To expand on this:

Carrot weather is a somewhat silly weather app. It is serious in that it aims to provide a very solid outlook on the weather with a highly customizable UI -- in fact you can even recreate the dark sky app’s UI if you'd like. However it is silly in that it comes with an “AI” “assistant” who spawns challenges and achievements.

I don't mind much but it can be a bit distracting in a weather app for the assistant to talk about our relationship.

I used to use DarkSky on Android

I've since put together a kit of much better alternatives:

Foreca [0] is most similar with at-a-glance daily or hourly (with drill-down) weather calendar display.

FlowX [1] is an amazing current visualization of any of numerous weather models in great detail as well as graphs of key values, hi-low, etc.. The visualization is spectacular and just swiping advances/reverses the point in time, so you can really see the motion of the weather systems, and show any of a dozen or so parameters (everything from temp. precip rate, clouds, wind speed, humidity, gasses, etc.). It is a spectacular tour-de-force of usabele visualization of quantitative data — I can't speak highly enough about it, and on the few times I've contacted the developer I found him friendly, knowledgeable, and helpful.

Rainy Days Radar [2] is a good visualization of current radar data. Very helpful in seeing the motion of current nearby precipitation and timing it's arrival.

All are very easy to switch to a different city/locale if you need info for somewhere else. I've got no relationship with any of these other than being a satisfied customer.

[0] www.foreca.com

[1] https://www.flowx.io/

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.neenbedank...

So glad to see the FlowX mention. I've been obsessed with that app since back when it was called WeatherBomb. The premium data is well worth the cost imo, and the customizable widgets are so useful once you dial them in for what you're interested in!

Yes, it was impressive even back int he WeatherBomb days, indeed!

Agree the premium data plans are totally worth it; tried it on a freebie period and signed right up. Didn't know what I was missing

Thanks for the support guys. I miss the WeatherBomb name too.

Hi HN, I'm making an indie, privacy-focused visual forecast app for iOS and Apple Watch, and have added a Dark Sky-style view a few days ago.

Here's the link: https://weathergraph.app

Screenshots: https://impresskit.net/6430c7f0-b34b-418f-9824-f386f939be9a/...

Compared to Apple Weather, it uses more weather sources (and often better - Foreca often ranks in top 3 at https://forecastadvisor.com and has 3-hour nowcast on par with Dark Sky), shows more forecast metrics (like wind speed & direction, humidity & dew point, UV index, etc.) and you can pick a color theme and metrics to display.

The app provides quite nice home screen and lock screen widgets for iOS, and many people say it’s the best weather complication for Apple Watch.

I am outdoor runner and biker, and as I built the app for myself, I made sure that the watch (and phone) app doesn’t go blank when it loses the connection or when you go running/biking without an LTE watch. Instead, it caches the last known forecast for up to 24 hours, as that's when the hourly forecast is still reasonably reliable, and shows ‘what would the weather according to the last forecast be right now’.

Weathergraph is also privacy focused (no ads or tracking), as that is how I want all apps on my phone/watch to behave.

The basic app with Dark Sky view and yr.no forecast is free, all the data sources and customizability can be unlocked with a subscription or a single payment.

Ask me anything :).

Seems like the apple weather app is updated? seems to 'just work' at this point :-)

No. I live in an unincorporated town. Dark Sky vs Apple was 3 degree difference as Apple reverted to the town 'next door'. But we actually have different weather. Slightly cooler. And rain hits us later.

Isn't Apple Weather using the Dark Sky data/API now? I thought that's why they shut down Dark Sky - because the Weather app incorporated everything in it.

You'd think, but this clearly didn't happen, as shown by the complaints online...

I use Weather Strip, which has a unique and slick interface for the upcoming week’s forecast. I’ve never seen another weather app quite like it.

Wow, this may be the one of the best designed weather apps I've ever used. I can see so much at once and don't need to think to process what I'm seeing.

I'm in the process of porting Flowx, an Android weather app, to iOS. It is currently released for beta testing. I've added most global and European data and am planning to add NOAA's NAM and HRRR data in the next week or two. I still have to add waves, radar and wind streamlines.

If you're interested in testing, email me or contact me via the flowx forum.

Readers should note that this is a fantastic app, a tour-de-force in useful visualization of quantitative data — live weather models in great detail — and one of the apps that would keeps me firmly in the Android world (although evidently now being ported to Apple).

No relationship other than satisfied (and impressed ) customer for many years. You've gotta try this!

Apple Weather (iOS, iPadOS, MacOS) is excellent.

Yeah, its excellent because Apple bought Darksky and shut down the app/website after integrating their tech and staff.

I miss being able to use the web interface though

No it still sucks compared to Dark Sky

Apple weather is about as useful as one of those plastic bubble popping lawnmowers. As in darn near useless. They hid the hourly reports a few levels into the app and the darn thing never is right for me. Makes me really hate apple a little bit more every time I use it. “Sunny and clear” no apple, it’s snowing.

Here’s a few suggestions from a similar question a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34269795

Change the lat/lon on this to yours but if their station isn't nearby accuracy wanes fast.

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?FcstType=graphical...

I've become a fan of personal weather stations but of course if you are traveling that doesn't work (unless a startup wants to put a weather station into a phone/watch somehow)

Radarnow has been my go to satellite weather app for many years now. Idk if it's the best because I haven't tried the others, but I like it and found it very accurate when living in Oregon. It was neet to time projects between the rain drops, literally.

I am working on an open source weather api: https://open-meteo.com

If you are looking for raw weather forecast data, it could be a good start

https://www.rainviewer.com/

Has been mostly good, where DarkSky never really worked in Europe.

Strange comment. As it was originally mostly ECMWF and a few other EU centric models that supported near term precip better than US models, it seemed better in EU to me. It got worse after it took off in US though, I'd agree. Meanwhile climacell worked better in US.

Consider checking out windy.app to compare models easily for one or a mix of several that work best where you are:

https://windy.app/support/windy-app-weather-forecast-models....

I'd moved from DarkSky to this years back, thanks to frequent travel to weird weather areas where I needed locally accurate microclimate handling.

Windy is great as well and I have been using that as well for forecasting, but one thing that’s missing compared to the Rainviewer/DarkSky seems to be the “real time” alerts. Thats what I believe DarkSky never supported outside US/UK - doppler radar or whatnot based notifications that seemed to be its main selling point. Apple Weather doesn’t support next hour precipitation notifications either outside UK/Ireland and US: > Next-hour precipitation forecasts and precipitation notifications are available for Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

TIL Climacell rebranded to Tomorrow.io

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.climacell.c...

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1443325509

edit: what a horrible app, can't delete unwanted cards from Feed and 14 days forecast show tempratures only for tomorrow with no data shown for other days plus let's ignore the fact it's iOS design just ported on Android

If you don’t mind a subscription, Carrot is an excellent app.

For Europe: https://www.windy.com/

windy.com

carrot, especially if you like to really customize your things. I personally really like that I can define specific weather stations in my area.

I also have some friends who really like “Hello Weather”.

MyRadar.

Ventusky

Ventusky is good and you can pan/expand the map unlike merrysky

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